I'm Annalisa Coliva. I'm a professor in the Philosophy Department and the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Today with me, I have Professor Tyrus Miller, who's the Dean of the School of Humanities and professor of English and Art History, welcome. Very good to be here. Also Professor Duncan Pritchard, who's Chancellor Professor of Philosophy. Good to be here. Okay. So, in order to get our conversation going, I believe it's important to connect this discussion with the other MOOC that has been done for the initiative confronting extremism on campus. Duncan has been the principal investigator for that MOOC, and which was on skepticism. So, a good starting point for our discussion I think is, what do you think are the relationships between skepticism and relativism? That is the main points of contact or differences between the two? Okay. That's an excellent question. I'd like to think of skepticism as the gateway drug into relativism, at least practically speaking. What I mean by that is that skepticism is they're very different really structurally because skepticism is doubt about an objective truth. It doesn't really make sense to have a widespread doubt unless you doubting something substantive. But once you start to doubt things in a radical way, once you start to doubt whether anything is true, whether you have any grip on truth at all, then I think it's very natural for that to slide into a relativism, a global relativism about truth. Where you start to wonder, "Well, maybe there is no such thing as an objective truth at all." So, I think skepticism in practice once it becomes quite radical can slide into relativism. But actually structurally, they are very different. Because in order to make sense of skepticism, you have to be skeptical of something. Really, it doesn't really make sense to be skeptical of something which is relative. If you're going to be skeptical to the truth, you have a skeptical of an objective truth. There's no point being skeptical of relative truth. Right. Well, that is an interesting take because sometimes it's been argued that at least with skepticism, with doubt of knowledge for sure. But with relativism, we may after all have some grip and yet say on knowledge, and yet say that it's relative to a framework or to a system of reference. So, what would you think of that? So, I think here we need to distinguish between a relativism which is about truth as opposed to relativism which is directed at something else, which would be I would say as an epistemologist relativism about reasons or evidence something like that's. So, evidence and reason here mean as it were guides to the truth. One could be a relativist about that. One might think that, "What counts as a good guide to the truth is not a fully objective matter. It might depend upon different perspectives, different standards, and so forth." That will be one way to be relativist. But you can be a relativist in that sense without thereby being a relativist about truth. I think it's important to keep them separate. Relativism about truth I think is probably self-defeating and self undermining. It probably incoherence to try and make sense of this idea of how is it even possible? I mean is the claim about relativism, about truth is itself a relative claim. I mean that's very hard to make sense of. But relativism is about epistemic standings, about reasons, about truth. That's a different thing. You can relativist about that and still be an objectivist about truth. I think there you've got to care in position. There you could see how skepticism could slide into that without that by sliding into relativism about truth. So, you won't become skeptical about the possibility of knowledge perhaps because one thinks that the standards, the criteria for how we pick out the truth are relative. That's why we can't ever have any objective knowledge of it. So, then you'd have a straightforward connection between the one and the other. Great. So, now moving on to Tyrus. Relativism is an ancient philosophical doctrine for sure. But it's one of the philosophical doctrines that has transcended the boundaries of laws of hand that has shaped other disciplines, in particularly the methodologies of other disciplines. We can see that with cultural anthropology for instance or certain branches of sociology. But it is also had an influence in political theories. So, how would you characterize the relevance of relativism for the humanities at large? Let's put it this way. Yeah. I mean I wanted to actually pick up on a point that Duncan was really making at the end, which is that there may be a skepticism about certain ideas of truth or certain ways of accessing truth that gives rise to an impulse towards relativistic frameworks really with the goal of giving an account that is in some sense more humanly realistic about how we approach truth, or how we produce knowledge. I think that's one of the things that has really animated various cultural accounts that for at least from a philosophical point of view might be seen as being relativist. In thinking about this question, I think of a variety of ways in which there's a sense of bringing additional disciplines to bear on that question. So, for instance, a very ancient debate and a very important thing for the formation of philosophy was the separation of philosophy from rhetoric. The rhetoric has really come back as a criticism of philosophies claims to truth in ways that may give rise to a relativism if philosophy, and its concepts, and its ways of accessing truth are always entangled with questions of persuasion, the figurative use of language and so forth. Then obviously, there are a variety of ways in which we enter into that dialogue with the truth. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're skeptical about there being an objective truth that we're getting at. It's really a question of how does the language through which we approach that or how do the modes of thinking, which may be entangled with myth, and belief, and so forth that we can't purge out. How does that affect our ability to to access? So, that's an important framework I think where cultural theory, literary theory, and relativism have had some important play, in a very radical sense, perhaps one of the most radical skeptics and relativist Friedrich Nietzsche, really said that language all language, including conceptual language is figurative language. These are really just alternative approaches to in his case he didn't really believe that there was any truth at the center of that. But that we were struggling over a figure that we called truth. So, that's one account. Another one which I think is a very serious one, and is really important both in the philosophical and in other traditions is what we would call the historicist account. So, this basically says that historical conditions, historical moments shape the approach that we have to truth, or maybe even the conception of truth at a particular point. I think probably most important for philosophy Hegel and then the successor of Hegel in the materialists way of Karl Marx either saying that historical truth, that truth evolves historically according to the unfolding of the idea, or in Marx's case that truth is always framed by a set of material conditions and our knowledge of it is constrained by that as well. A couple of other approaches that I want to mention in this that I think have also been very influential, and again represent in some ways a sense of the limits of philosophy as a discipline or as a discourse. One would be the anthropological. You mentioned already cultural anthropology. But I would also broaden that out to philosophers who were influenced by anthropology like Ernest Cosira talks about symbolic forms and he thinks about myth, about art, and about science as really all three being symbolic worlds that approach the world in different ways, but all in some ways represent equally valid approaches. It's been very important in linguistics in looking at the question of how different languages frame the world, and whether language is actually a prism that allows us to see certain things and creates blind spots in other. If you really take the number of languages and the evolution of language over time, there may be many many worldviews that are refracted by language. Then lastly, I would mention pragmatism. The idea that the desire of philosophy to really get at a grounded truth, and a knowledge that can be transcendentally- Grounded and verified is too great an ambition. We should really be looking towards what does a legitimate community say about what is true or what is a valid. It's account that says what scientists say, what scientists who have the authorization to say, says it's valid at a particular moment, is what we take as truth, and we shouldn't be really looking for a stronger account. Right. Thank you. So now, I would like to move on to a question for both of you. Relativism is often considered to foster tolerance. The idea is roughly this. If there are no absolute truth, so no absolute values, then each truth, or set of values that people may want to endorse is legitimate. So, that seems to really foster a tolerant attitude towards difference. At the same time, if we look at the history of ideas, and as we have just seen, relativism is not just a philosophical doctrine, and has transcended the boundaries of philosophy, we see that it has been used in very different contexts to motivate very different views. So, certainly, it was some battle cry in the 70s for certain liberal movements, but before that, and maybe surprisingly, it was also advocated by Mussolini, and used to promote fascism. Nowadays, we may think of appealing to relativism to support the idea that there are no absolute truths and facts, but there may be alternative facts, or such about climate change or vaccines. So, what is your take on the relationship between relativism and tolerance? I don't know which one of you will want to start? Should I go first? Yeah. So, I think that we need to separate out a few things here. Clearly, this is an intellectual virtue, virtue of inquiry, which relates to tolerating of alternative viewpoints, or recognizing one's fallibility as an inquirer. I think, that kind of moderate skepticism, drives a lot of science in fact. But that's entirely consistent with thinking that there is an objective fact of the matter that we're trying to discover. The problem with- if you convert, if you take the stronger line here, we should think that there's some intolerant about having a relativism about truth, which I take is the move that's in play here, is that in a sense, it feels tolerant, but it isn't really tolerant at all. Because what you're doing is, if someone presents a view, and then, someone else presents the opposing view, and then you say, ''Well, really, they're not talking at all, that one is just relative to the other.'' We're not now finding a way for them to live side-by-side in peace with one another, the two viewpoints, because each viewpoint wasn't presented as a relative viewpoint, it was presented as the way things really are. So, if you then re-categorize that viewpoint as simply being, well, it's just their opinion, or their subjective truth, or something like that, then what you've done is you recharacterized in a way that doesn't actually convey what they meant. Take any deeply charged political debate, let's say, something about which we care about. Someone who thinks that abortion is wrong, and someone that thinks, who believes, who takes the opposing view, neither of them is presenting it as simply the truth as they see it subjectively. They're presenting it as the truth, right? So, if we really characterize that, just simply as a subjective claim, then we haven't captured what it is that they're arguing about. So, in fact, we're not tolerating each other's viewpoints at all. It seems to me by making that move. It's kind of, it's an illusion. But I do think though, it's absolutely crucial to understand that being committed to that, being objective truth, and being committed to that, being at least in principle ways of uncovering objective truth, is entirely compatible with the thought that we should think of ourselves as fallible subjects. That inquiry should be open. We should be willing to take on board counter-evidence, and be skeptical as it were, be driven by a localized skepticism, about our own faculties, and our ability to uncover the truth. Right. Also, sensitive for the things that we were just talking about, about how historically contingent a lot of the ways in which we discover the truth can be. Once we have an awareness of that, awareness of how things like language, and social situation, historical situations, one can inform out a ways of finding the truth, and that can uncover styles of fallibility that we need to take on board, and incorporate into our practices, and take seriously. I think that kind of intellectual humility if you like, that should be the core of our practice. That is I think, really important to understanding how to resolve these disputes in ways that might be fruitful, rather than just simply saying that both sides are arrived in a subjective sense. Right. Tyres, what's your view? Well, it's a complicated question. I think one thing that I would say, is posing the question in that way, sometimes can entangle a number of different issues that it's worth at least teasing out a little bit. The difference between a skepticism about a factual truth, a moral question that might be associated with that. What I would describe, they're not easy to disentangle, but questions of truth, and questions of meaning, where a range of interpretations might be quite valid, or a range of let's say, cultural framings that include things like the moral evaluation. So, I think one response that I would make is, it's worth unpacking those different dimensions. I think, it can be, the notion of say, fake news, is often an attack on there being something that you may be actually have quite convincing evidence right in front of you, and it's being, and it's the factuality of that's being evaded. Fact doesn't necessarily establish meaning, and there can be very legitimate debates. I think, it actually, is when I talked about giving a realistic account of how we get at truth and knowledge. If you will, a fact about human societies is that they are almost, they're irreparably plural, and they are constant. There's a constant tendency towards fracture, and conflict, as well as convergence at particular moments on particular issues. I think that's something that really should be taken into account, and when we talk about these questions of relativism, I have to say that I attend towards the historicist, and the pragmatist account, precisely because I do put a strong emphasis on that fact of human societies really having a range of positions, and a lot of ways in which even when there's factual agreement, there's disagreement about how to interpret them morally, or in terms of the implications of meanings of those facts. Yes. Thank you very much for your contributions. Thanks. Thank you.
